Bath Middle School

Bath Middle School is a grades 6–8 school at 2700 Bible Rd in Lima, OH, enrolling 417 students as the only middle school in Bath Local, a 4-star district ranked 84th of 773 Ohio districts (89th percentile). The school currently ranks 130th statewide among Ohio middle schools — the 88th percentile — and has never fallen below the 81st percentile in ten reported years, peaking at the 94th percentile in 2021–22. Roughly 45% of its students are economically disadvantaged, a moderate-poverty profile for this part of northwest Ohio.

Bath belongs to a regional top tier of four schools, alongside three much smaller rural schools — Bluffton Middle School, Columbus Grove Middle School and Pandora-Gilboa Middle School. Against the larger, closer schools, Bath leads clearly: it beats Shawnee Middle School, Elida Middle School and Allen East Middle School in all six core grade-and-subject measures, often by 10–20 points, and far outpaces the closest schools, Lima West Middle School and Lima North Middle School. Its standout is 8th-grade science at 89.7% proficient versus 61.2% statewide; middle-grades math is its relative soft spot, where the small rural peers have pulled ahead. Notably, Bath's low-income students rank in the 94th percentile statewide — higher than the school's own overall rank — and it achieves all this on the lowest per-pupil spending of the four top-tier schools.

Chronic absenteeism is Bath's most improved metric, cut from 24.1% to 12.7% in four years, though it now sits slightly above its district rate of 11.3% and above its academic peers. Special education is the one real gap, at the 64th percentile and 3 stars, but it has improved three years running. The school reports 100% Algebra I proficiency, though that reflects a small accelerated cohort.